The Moment of Victory
by Maraudercat
Summary: "That moment when a tribute becomes a victor." A brief glimpse of these moments through 75 years of Hunger Games.
1. 1st Treason Games

DISCLAIMER: Anything you recognize belongs to Suzanne Collins, or to others holding rights to the Hunger Games

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**1st Games: Marcie O'Malley, District 12, age 15**

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They had all promised to die as heroes, as proud rebels, never bowing to the Capitol's evil rules. Sent into a sandy killing field, surrounded on all sides by cheering, jeering people of the Capitol in the stands, they were supposed to race for the pile of weapons in the centre. They were supposed to fight and fall until one remained, the winner of the Treason Games.

Instead they stand together in silence. Heads held high, staring back at the crowd until the cheers turn to insults and demands of the guards. After ten minutes the first shot is fired. The tall, strong boy from District One breaks the silence as he screams for his shattered knee. The rest stay standing, silent, unmoving, waiting for their turn.

Bang. Crack. Boom.

Shot after shot, scream after scream, one by one they all fall down.

Her turn comes near the end. The first shot takes her through the stomach, cutting a burning path through her insides. She fights through the agony and forces herself to stay upright. The second shot cracks her shin and she collapses to the ground with the others, writhing and moaning, but never ever giving in.

One by one they bleed out to the moans and cries of agony, the roiling waves of anger and disappointment washing from the crowd, until only she is left. She doesn't realize she's the last one alive until the white men stand over her, ready to shoot until the call over the lead man's communicator stops them.

"Hold your fire, we still need a victor. She'll have to do. Take her back and make her cooperate."

The bag slides over her head and she doesn't see light for a very long time.


	2. 2nd Treason Games

**2nd Games: Arkose Bradley, District 2, age 18**

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Last year they watched them fall, one by one to Peacekeeper bullets. This year they were assured it would be different. The tributes said otherwise and when they are released into the sand arena, they move as one to the places where their fellows died and stand in silence once more.

This time the Capitol gives them only one minute before they release the animals. Big cats of several sorts come racing out, snarling. On the far side a howl intermingles with a high-pitched baying laugh.

When the girl beside him falls shrieking and the great black cat tears a mouthful of her insides from her still-writhing body he breaks and runs for the weapons. Those who are still standing follow.

The spear feels strange in the hand that has only ever wielded a gun and a stone hammer, but he reacts instinctively to the spotted cat's lunge and takes it down the throat. Its companion claws his outstretched arm as he tries to draw the weapon free and he falls back while another boy strikes it with a heavy club.

He grabs another spear and the two fight back-to-back to finish it, joining with the only other survivor while the remaining animals prowl.

A roar of approval reaches them from the stands, three hundred thousand cheering for their blood by any means. The two remaining cats lunge forwards; his spear takes one through the eye, the boy beside him falls with a cry, his leg shredded.

The cat goes in for the wounded kill, giving him time to snatch up the last spear and end its life. A sudden noise from behind makes him twirl and stab out instinctively and it takes him several seconds to realize the bleeding hunk of flesh on the end of his weapon isn't an animal, but his last remaining ally. He drops the spear in revulsion and falls to the ground, waiting for the claws and teeth to rend him apart.

Instead he hears "Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the winner of the Second Treason Games, Arkose Bradley from District Two."


	3. 3rd Treason Games

So much for uploading every other day...

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**3rd Games: Abram Talbot, District 10, age 17**

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There is no resistance this year. Off in the distance he can see a pile of weapons, just like they were told. And he can see figures running for them, from all directions. The indiscriminate roar of the crowd rushes in as a weight on his back pushes him forwards, one step onto the grass so that the heavy metal door slides closed. Trapping him.

Already there is a clash of metal, screaming. He knows then that all hope of continuing is over. They thought if they just kept refusing to fight, refusing to play the game, that eventually the Capitol would break.

But the districts broke first. The boy and girl from District Seven swore vengeance for the murder of their 'brother'. Vengeance against a thirteen-year-old boy, the cousin of last year's victor. And already they have axes in hand, the boy's head at their feet.

A girl yells at them and they attack her too, burying the sharp axe-head in her stomach. And suddenly everyone is fighting, a trapped herd, panicked and doing everything they can to get out, whatever the cost.

He just waits. Waits by his door, watching, heartbroken as the relatives of brave rebels hack one another to pieces because someone broke.

Next year it will be vengeance against District Seven. And Four, as the rangy boy disarms and strangles the vicious girl with the axe. And Eleven, a bony girl who sneaks up behind the boy from Four and knifes him in the back. And Five, a crazy kid who grabs the bony girl and punches her over and over and over until her face is raw and his fists are bloody.

They are nothing but animals. He knows how to kill animals.

The boy from Five comes at him, still spattered in another's blood. He pins the scrawny kid like a stubborn calf, and drives the boy's head into the wall. Drops the lifeless lump of meat and waits.

The girl from Six comes at him next, knife in hand. A wolf, come to savage the herd. He puts her down like the mongrel she is.

The last to come is the boy from One. Limping, whimpering, an injured creature for whom death would be a mercy. Mercy he is willing to grant.


	4. 4th Treason Games

**4th Games Alko Johnson, District 11, age 18**

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This year they do something different. Instead of being released into a fighting ring surrounded by a cheering crowd they find themselves in a wide, mostly open expanse, half a mile across, ringed by a solid wall of stone broken only by the twenty-four doors they entered through. The pile of weapons is a long, long way away in the centre and he's faster than the rest. Years of hauling barrels of produce across fields has left him strong, and the weighted club takes little skill to use.

With three bodies at his feet the others keep their distance, retreating to the edges of the Arena in ones and twos, prepared to wait him out while they prey on the weaker competition. He takes the chance to rest, the central area clear of the scattered boulders or walls for a fifty yard radius so that he has plenty of warning if anyone tries to attack, and lets the minutes pass.

One by one he hears the cannons fire, every one earns a line in the ground, a simple tally, four posts crossed by a gate until there are three full gates and one nearly completed in the fading light. Two singles and a pair, spread out to a near perfect triangle around him.

He makes the clever choice and waits for them to move. One of the singles tries moving from cover to cover, but is forced to charge across the open space in the middle. Fifty yards is plenty of warning and he's bigger and armed.

Twenty.

The pair, a boy and girl from District Eight split and approach from either side. He takes the boy first, giving the girl time to grab a knife and slash him across the side of his face. He breaks her neck.

Twenty-two.

He decides there's no point waiting now and moves towards the final figure, slow steps, shirt balled against the cut until he comes in sight of the final girl. A smaller boy lies before her, eyes bulging from a blue-faced corpse. She whimpers at his approach, the jagged bone protruding from her leg catches the orange glow of sunset. She doesn't resist when he brings his club down on her skull.

Twenty-three.


	5. 5th Treason Games

**5th Games: Emilio Buchanan, District 1, age 17**

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He doesn't understand why he is here. Until now, the only children thrown into the fighting ring of the Games had been relatives of rebels, or involved in rebellion themselves. Sure there was a play of choosing them at random, but no-one was surprised by those left standing on the stage.

But his parents were supporters of the Capitol, or as close as anyone got in the Districts. Shunned by most of the population, they took the opportunity for wealth and position in return for spying for the Capitol. They clawed to heights they never would have managed otherwise, and this is the repayment they receive.

He doesn't want to fight, to kill, but he wants to die less. Instead of a mostly open expanse, they are thrown into the barren wilds, facing animals and their own hunger and thirst more than each other. He knows nothing of the outdoors, so he fights from the start for the supplies left in the middle of the Arena. Later he discovers there are no resources in the land. Many of the plants are poison and there's no water supply, which is why they come back to him.

One by one the bodies pile at his feet, and he doesn't quite know _how_. Sure he is bigger than the rest of them, older, probably healthier. But he doesn't have the strength of a worker, the desperation of someone who has spent years starving and scraping to survive. When the last person falls, three days later he's a little surprised to hear the trumpets announcing his victory.

It's not like he even had to try.


	6. 6th Treason Games

**6th Game: Hans Mayer, District 7, age 16**

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They come for him only minutes after the screen showing the final, bloody, brutal fight goes black. Four peacekeepers break down the door and surround him, put a gun to his mother's head and order him to cooperate. He doesn't understand why, but he goes quietly, still trying to process the images from the Games, his brother possibly dying on another boy's sword.

They buckle him down for the hovercraft ride to the Capitol, arms and legs cuffed, gun still at his mother's head. He wants to ask, "What has his brother done? Was he not supposed to win? Did he do something wrong?"

But every time he opens his mouth a gun-butt is slammed into his ribs and he closes it again.

When they land they are taken directly to an enormous mansion. The president's mansion, he knows it from TV, though the man himself isn't there. Instead they are met by people with cases and clipboards, people with fine robes and soft fingers, who point at him and mutter low comments to scribbling scribes until one of them finally gestures and he and his mother are shoved into chairs.

He can't take it anymore. "What happened to my brother?" he demands loudly enough to lull the room to silence.

A purple robed figure comes over to loom above him, face ashen but stern.

"Your name is Hans Mayer and you are the victor of the 6th Treason Games. Your brother died after he attacked a Peacekeeper in District Seven following your victory. If you fail to cooperate, your mother will also be charged with assaulting a Peacekeeper and executed. Do you understand?"

He doesn't understand until the surgeons come to make the alterations to his face, to turn him from his brother's shadow into his twin.

He is their victor now, whether he likes it or not.


	7. 7th Treason Games

**7th Games: Garret Moore, District 2, age 16**

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He will not die. He WILL NOT die. The mantra that he repeats to himself, over and over, that keeps him swinging the blade and not caring whether it strikes thick vines, savage mutts or other tributes.

It doesn't matter who they are or how pitiful their story is. Only one of them can come out alive and he's damned sure it's going to be him. Because he isn't ready to die.

Bettany, his girl, is eight months pregnant and needs his support. His father is crippled, a rockslide in the quarry that conveniently killed or injured twenty rebel sympathizers. His kid brother is only eight and needs him for just about everything. And the Capitol started providing monthly food deliveries to the victor's home district and rebuilding houses. All those kids he grew up with, starving, orphaned, living in burned out huts with leaky roofs. He could save them too.

No, he can't die, which means everyone else must.


	8. 8th Treason Games

**8th Games: Nio Krauss, District 5, age 14**

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He's too small. A simple yet obvious observation that he was certain meant his death from the moment his name was drawn. Ten of the other boys are taller and stronger, and half the girls are too. There's no way he can out-muscle them, so if he wants to survive he has to beat them at something else.

The arena helps him at that, the rocky plain riddled with tunnels beneath the surface. Tunnels the others ignore because they are too claustrophobically tight for their broad-shouldered frames. Not too tight for him.

It's all he needs to win, a knife, stolen from the supply pile during the first night, and his tunnels, popping up here, escaping pursuit there. Waiting out his foes, his patience his saviour on more than one occasion.

When it comes to the final fight he is starving, nauseous, dehydrated and probably half-crazy, but it doesn't matter when he strikes first from below. Cuts the artery in his opponent's leg, takes a non-lethal wound in return and retreats back into his hole, blood dripping from the mangled fingers of his hand until the gong sounds and an echoed voice announces his victory.

Two months later he hits his man's growth, and within a year he is taller than any of the boys he faced. He never underestimates those who are smaller than him.


End file.
